He called for "a return to normalcy," yet he was in office for only about 2 1/2 years and is found consistently at the bottom of lists ranking U.S. presidents.

He was Warren Gamaliel Harding, the nation’s 29th president. But Harding was also a newspaperman, and, it appears, not a bad one at that. So, when he secured the Republican nomination for president in 1920, it’s not surprising he was looked at favorably by newspapers across the country, which anticipated his election. Among the newspaper support he received came from the Leelanau Enterprise.

"If President Harding is as big a success as Editor Harding is, he will go down in history in the Hall of Fame," wrote J. Gabbert of Riverside Calif., in an article just published on his return from Marion, Ohio, where he visited Harding’s newspaper.

Historians would probably say Harding was more worthy of the "hall of shame" instead. Only the administration of U.S. Grant was comparably shaken by corruption.

The Enterprise article appeared on page one in the edition of Oct. 14, 1920. It appeared under the heading: "EDITORS PAY VISIT TO MARION STAR AND FIND A REAL PAPER."

"We found just the sort of a paper a future President might be expected to edit," Gabbert wrote, "and the visit, to us came nearer to being an editorial conference than a political crusade.

"’We found that Editor Harding follows closely every detail incident to the publication of his paper. He knows what pay the helpers on the floor get, just as he knows the amount he pays his manager. He can handle type like the rest of us, and it would keep my foreman busy to beat him on setting up a stick of eight-point type. He knows how to make up a paper like a veteran and he is just as much at home in the business office looking over the advertising accounts."

But Editor Harding found himself, as he once admitted to a confidant, "over my head" as President Harding. Friends appointed to important posts proved unworthy of his trust and scandals began to unfold. We can only speculate what the full culmination of this might have meant for Harding, because he died in office on Aug. 2, 1921 – before the entire impact of corruption had been felt. Calvin Coolidge, who became the new president, was unimpeachable and was easily elected president in his own right in 1924.

Harding was nominated at a convention held in Chicago where there was plenty of haggling, wheeling and dealing by the powerful of the party to find an acceptable candidate. Important decisions were made not by the many but a few meeting in "smoke-filled rooms."

When the convention opened, Harding was not even the most prominent of the candidates for the nomination, but it was finally given to him – after 10 ballots.

In the November general election, Harding easily trounced the Democratic candidate, James M. Cox, who is seldom recalled today. It was an entirely different matter with the defeated Democratic vice-presidential candidate, however.

Twelve years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president – and then again and again and again.

Another political article appeared directly under the 1920 Enterprise piece on Harding, and the heading was: "PARTY FACES DISASTER – GORE." The Gore referenced was "Senator Thomas Gore, Democrat, of Oklahoma, who was defeated for re-nomination through the influence of the White House because of his opposition to the League of Nations, plainly indicates that he proposes to continue his fight upon the league," the Enterprise reported.

"The paramount issue is to avert disaster; nobody favors the league that understands it," the senator was quoted as saying.

In the end, those opposed to the league won out, and the U.S. didn’t join it.

The political scene in the 1920s was a lively one, indeed, just as it is today, and all the jousting and wrangling then seems very familiar.

The satirists of the "Roaring Twenties" had plenty of fodder to work with. Henry Louis Mencken was the "Art Buchwald" of his day, and with words painted biting, sharp pictures of both Harding and Coolidge.

A few weeks after Coolidge’s death in 1933, Mencken recalled the former president’s "one really notable talent."

"He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored."

Gore’s fellow Oklahoman and former cowhand, Will Rogers, became a famous humorist and political pundit whose comments appeared in about 350 daily newspapers.

"We have the best Congress money can buy," he once said, but he was better known for his remark about the "fourth estate," which became a byword in the 1920s. "All I know is what I read in the papers," he said.